Barbell YouTube Strategies, Updated Video Set-Ups and Jacob's Photography Going Viral

Hey, folks, and welcome to another episode of the Creator Toolbox. This is the show all about the nuts and bolts behind any creator business. I'm Colin Gray from thepodcasthost.com, joined by Jacob, as always. How you getting on, Jacob? Hello. I'm dead. Well, dead well. I'm in Thailand. You've been off for two weeks like that. I mean, that's the definition of dead. Well, I know, I know. Yeah, it's good. Glad to be back, though. It's been a while. Good. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. We did one in your absence. I did one with Matthew, so that was quite good. Fun, actually, to record with somebody else for a little while, but yeah. So we've been getting on with the creator at toolboxing. Have you been thinking, like, doing much creative work while you've been away? I think you were doing a fair bit of photography, weren't you? I was doing a fair bit of photography and actually really

enjoying it. Just flowing down to, yeah, enjoy the act of taking photos, but try to find interesting angles and not just like, trying to take a photo to be like, ah, I've been here. But, yeah, try to capture interesting things and interesting moments and weird angles that maybe you've not considered more famous things from. Yeah, I really enjoyed that. It was cool, creative. Did a lot of journaling. Yeah, it was good. Went to a lot of museums, which is fantastic

for me. I love museums. This is a random side quest, but you actually ended up trying to sell some photography quite recently, didn't you? Do you want to tell that story? Yeah, sure. So, I mean, it was a crazy 48 hours, but a few months back, um, there was a solar storm that seemed like it was going to be quite strong. We didn't really know how strong it was going to be. But there's one spot in Edinburgh where if you're going to see the aurora, the northern

lights, it was going to be there. So I went to this spot on a hill, one of the highest parts you can get over the. Over the city lights. And I went there just in the off chance that I could see it. And it ended up being the most amazing orchestra of light in the sky. It was crazy. It was crazy. Nothing like I'd ever seen before. Crazier than I'd ever seen Edinburgh. It was really

beautiful. But when I was there, I was trying to take some good photos because actually, the thing with the northern lights is when you do a bit of a three second exposure on a photo, so you keep the lens open for 3 seconds more of the light gets in so it looks more intense. And actually, it's quite a cool way to see it after the fact, but it was stunning without that. I took a few photos

and I took some quite cool photos and some of them with the. There's this monument on this hill, very creatively called the monument. And I managed to just frame it in a way that was. I was, you know, I was dead chuffed with it. So I put it on Twitter and I think I just used

a hashtag like northern lights aurora or something like that. And, you know, so this storm hit and it was quite strong that night and there was all sorts of people seeing all sorts of things. So I think people were just trolling Twitter for. For footage of it and for photos. And that photo went pretty viral. Ended up getting used by CNN, Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Guardian, the Israeli times. I think it got used by RT as well, or such a day, like,

just all over the world. Major news agencies ended up using it because. And this is. Yeah, this is where the selling of the photo or the not selling of the photo comes into the story. Someone from CNN contacted me and asked me for my permission to use it. And I asked the question about getting some money from it and she said, yes, I can go and ask the team, but the likelihood is that we've got all these other photos coming in. They'll probably just say no, and your photo

will never see the light of day anyway. So I said, fuck it. I would much rather have some fun with this in the moment and just give it to them for free. And I'm so glad I did because it ended up. Got it. Yeah. Ended up in all these places and it was just. It was crazy. Crazy. 48 hours. Um, you know, it just. It would come up randomly on the tv, which is so fun. Um, but I could have made a bit of money from it. Probably not that much. Yeah, but you set

up a weed store for the picture afterwards, didn't you? Yeah, yeah, I made a little bit of money. Um, not a great amount. I'd have done that at the start of the night. I would have made a lot more money. But, yeah, I turned it into like, a jigsaw. I got some prints and a few people bought some, and I did make, like, a little bit of money. I'm glad it did, you know, be no marketer or creator if I didn't find some way to make a few shillings on it.

Do you think if you'd got that up earlier, it would have got more attention, would you be able to sell a few of those? I think so. I think so. Because by the time that I set that leg was the next morning, there's like a. At best, you're getting like a 36 hours cycle of viral. Virality on Twitter. And by that point it was like, we're on like the last leg. So it was, it was cool that I got anything at all from it, to be honest. But if for some reason I had that store ready to go, ready primed,

and I knew. The thing is, I didn't know how to do that. I didn't know. I knew the concepts. I knew you could get printing on demand and I knew I'd use Shopify before, but I didn't know how to connect to and I didn't know what one to use, so I spent like two and a half hours or something that morning doing it. And by the time I got it up, like most of the, most of the eyeballs had already been and gone. Yeah. So that was your toolkit for that, was it?

Shopify directed to some kind of print on demand store? Yeah. So it's cool. So you actually just set up the products in Shopify and then there's the print on demand as a service kind of integrates with that set up. The sort of. No, I think I misremembered. I think you set up the things that you want to print on the print on demand store and then that integrates with Spotify and then it's Shopify and then it creates the products in Shopify for you. So they just buy through your storefront and

then the order gets sent to the print on demand. With my one, the one that I used, you had to. There's probably a way to turn it off, but you have to manually accept each order, which was fine. There wasn't that many, but yeah, it was cool. Nice way to get a photography or a product store up and running pretty quickly, to be honest. If you've got. Yeah, if you've got some products to sell. Nice. Yeah, for sure. All right, cool. Yeah, yeah, it was,

it was fun to see that happening. I was watching from afar, but, yeah. Cool to see all the photos whizzing around the world. Yeah. All right, let's jump into a tool. So I wanted to talk about lighting. About lighting for video. I've been trying to up the quality and output of our videos for the last little while and we recently took on a new video producer, so we employed somebody, a lady called Barbara.

It turned out to be really good so far, and she is a video producer by trade, and she brought all of her gear with her to the office the other day. So she came into this room I'm in right now. She brought all of her lighting, like three pro cameras, all of this stuff, partly because she had said she'd looked at the videos, given me some feedback, and I was like, is it really that much better having good lights and, like a two grand camera as opposed to my 600 pound camera?

She was like, well, let me show you. So she brought it all in. Yeah. And so it took a while to set up. It was like an hour set up. There was these massive. Have you seen, like, massive, the big kind of pro level lights, Jacob? Yeah, I think so. I mean, we made an ad once, but,

like, rent a coffee shop when we got this team in, and it was like a full team, there was a guy with the boom and the guy with the lights, and it was a whole setup. So it might not have been the same, but it gave me an idea, I think. Yeah, it'll give you an idea. Yeah, totally. They're just enormous. They're absolutely ridiculous. Like, right now, my desk is placed about half a meter, 60 cm away from the wall. And that fits my camera in behind there. It fits my

current lights in behind the desk. But I had to pull the cat there. I had to pull the desk out about a meter and a half, maybe even 2 meters from the wall. I was almost hitting that wall behind me to fit this massive light in there and a big kind of box. So there was one big, flat softbox behind the camera and one sort of softbox, almost like a sun. It was like this hanging ball. You know, those old school paper lantern type lights you get.

Lampshades you get. It was almost like something like that hanging. And both of them were so bright. And we started filming with them. And Barbara showed me her good cameras and stuff. And it is crazy, the difference, actually, in terms of the. Just the feel of the footage, because it's so much more soft, for a start, because of the different. The quality of the light and the quality

of the camera as well, actually. And she's got one proper filmmaker camera which just had a really nice quality to it. But that stuff is just not really that practical for here. So we're looking at alternatives. We're sticking with my current camera because we've got a really good lens for it. So actually, I just swapped out the lens and we figured out a way to set it up so that the lens is much better suited to where it is. So it's a prime lens. It's about. I think it's 22 mil focal length.

And it's got a really nice f stop on it. It's like 1.4. So actually, if I get nice and close to it, it's nice and blurred behind me. And good quality detail on the face as well. Particularly with the lights a bit improved now as well. And all this. Just both, actually. I've had this one for a while, but I couldn't use it for a while because I've been using the teleprompter. And the teleprompter doesn't work with certain types of lenses. Lenses that have to actually go in and out to focus.

Because imagine you're hanging the prompter in the front of this lens. And some of the lens, the delicate mechanism within this lens can't move because it's got this weight. Yeah, that sounds like a nightmare. Even if it was technically okay, it wouldn't feel right. Yes. Yeah. So I've changed that. I've mounted the prompter on a stand behind my monitor. So it's standing by itself. And the camera is on a tripod behind the prompter

now, actually. So it also gives me the flexibility to pick up the camera and move it much more easily now too. So. But the lights actually, this. So this is the interesting thing I found. Managed to, like, get near the same quality. Not quite, I. Barbara's setup's definitely a little bit better, but near the same quality with just an upgraded lens, which cost about 200 and 5300 pounds compared to a two grand camera. And two good softboxes for my cheapy led

lights. So I've just got led panel lights, newer brand that neewer. And you get a few different types of softboxes for them that you can actually put the front. Didn't even know these existed. And there's a couple of things with them. Yeah. One of them is just a filter. So it's just a white filter over the front. So it just softens the light. It just kind of diffuses it out a little bit, makes it quite nice. And it's also circular. So you're a. You're a

photographer. In a way, Jacob, like, in a way. Sorry. You are a photographer, Jacob. Do you know the whole thing around, like, circular likes versus square lights that I didn't know at all? I'm not a photographer very much now. It should tell me, because this is news to me. So apparently it's quite a subtle thing. It's a bit subconscious, but a picture of a portrait, a picture of a person looks more attractive to people. Looks more, just nicer to look at. Looks more high quality.

If the reflection in the eyeballs is actually a little bit circular. So there's like, you get a little bit reflection. And the theory is that it's because the sun's circular, so it's like natural light. It's what you. What we're used to, essentially. But so many

of the lights we get these days are square. And my leds here are square. And my other little one in front of me is square. And it does give a more square effect to the light reflected in your eyes. And it's why beauty, people use, like, a ring light so much because it creates this double circular reflection in your eyeballs. Yeah. It's even more important for that because you're so close to the camera sometimes.

Yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. So, so this softbox I got is a circle that fits onto a square light and creates a bit of that effect. So that's one thing really cool, actually. That's really cool. So I've got. Yeah, I've got that one behind the camera, creating that kind of straight on light, a bit of a circle under eyes. But I've got another one over to the left here, which is a waffle softbox, which. Do you know what I mean by that? No. No. Oh, actually, I might do. I might do. Is it got like,

slats that kind of fold out? Yeah. Okay, that's exactly. Just controlling the sort of beam of the light, as it were. Totally, yeah, exactly. It's like, it's a waffle type shape. It's a, basically a screen that fits on top and front of your light. But it's divided into squares. There's bars up and down, up and down, up and down. There's bars left and right, left and right, left and right. So it divides it all up into little squares. And it just cuts the side light completely.

It makes your light so directional. It just points forward. And what that can do is I can put it off to the side a little bit. Lights up the side of my face, gives a wee bit more shadow definition, that kind of stuff. But it doesn't light up the background at all. So less useful in this situation where I'm sitting right now because my background is miles away. It's kind of lit anyway. But in our dark corner, I've got a dark corner over to the left here where I do some filming.

It's really nice to have the background really dark and moody. And it's perfect for that. So it can light me a bit more, the face a bit more, and not light up the background. So that's cool. I've always wondered how that was done and I kind of assumed it was some sort of spotlight that was just, like, super focused on that one bit of face, but, yeah, that's cool. I'd imagine. I'd imagine

that works, too. Yeah, I'd imagine that's an alternative, because it kind of turns a more diffuse light into a spotlight, this approach. Yeah. So the thing was, lighting is, the few times I've stood in front of professional lighting, my eyes just go blurry and starry and, like, I can't. It's hard, even. I've got this little light here and I've actually had to point it away from myself, much to the. Well, the disadvantage of my lighting. But it's bright.

So how does that feel with all those lights on you now? Is it not? I think it's all right, actually. I've kind of got used to it, maybe. And also it's quite soft as well, because of these softboxes. Like, it's deliberately made a bit more diffuse and I don't have them super bright either, so. You're right, it does. It's a bit glaring. I like it when I turn it off. It feels like a bit of a relief when

I turn them round and point at the wall. But I can do an hour or two on a call like this or a bit of filming and stuff and it's not a big issue. As long as it's not all day. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. Yeah. So that's the lighting. So, yeah, basically, it boils down to two newer led lights. That's n e e w e r. You get them on Amazon, they're only about 80 quid. I think. I'll put some links, actually, in the show notes below, directing towards the right ones, I've got the two softboxes.

I'll put links to them as well. The ones just like in a nice round softbox. One's the waffle one and. Yeah, and basically, that's it for the lighting. So, yeah, that's it for the face lighting, certainly. Yeah. Got me to at least talk to her and get some tips. Yeah, definitely, definitely. So, the other. I'll chuck in a last one as well for that dark background over there. In fact, you can probably see them here as well.

Jacob, you're looking at the video if you're listening. I have two new bulbs behind me which are creating quite a nice warm effect. And it's these massive, big, like, they're super fashionable right now. You go into any hipster bar and you see these bulbs hanging from the roof and they're clear and you can see the filaments in the middle of them, but they look really nice in the background of a video if you've got that blurred effect in the background. And it turns out you can get these, like,

pretty cheap, to be honest. At the. Just at the DIY store, I went to B and Q, but wherever you are, like, what's it called in the US? The Home Depot. Depot. That's the one, yeah, yeah, that kind of thing. You probably get bulbs there. No worries. I've got a couple of Philips Hue ones, which are the colored ones I have in the background, but there's also. It's maybe a bit of a scam here,

but have you heard of Philips Wiz? I've never heard of Philips Wiz, no. So I think Philips are basically not selling enough hue light bulbs because the things cost a flipping fortune. They're like 2030 quid for just a basic light bulb. But Philips whiz seems to be a new brand. Still smart white bulbs? Still smart light bulbs. You still get the colored ones, you still get the white ones, they're still smartphone controlled, but they're cheaper somehow.

So it's like. So it works all the same. It's just not the Philips Hue brand. Pretty much, yeah. Yeah. Does it still need the bridge? No. No. So I think the main difference is that you control it via your phone rather than like, via Alexa and the bridge and all that kind of stuff. Maybe there's a bit less smart home capability, that kind of stuff, but just. People that want basic control, the lights with my phone,

which is, I imagine, what a lot of people with Philips Hue want. When I bought a couple of Philips Hue things and, like, I just wanted to turn my light off without getting out of bed. That's all I wanted. I didn't want to have to buy like, a bridge. Yeah, absolutely. Yep, yep, totally. So I just went to. Went to B and Q, bought a few of these Philips Wiz bulbs to try out one big kind of long one, which looks quite cool for the background. One big bulbous one as well.

I put a long one into a base that I had already, but I actually just went on Amazon and bought two bulb. Two lamp bases. You get these really basic black lamp bases and it's now sitting in my shelves in the dark background space as well, so it makes that look really nice. Yeah. So it's really good when it's. If I can get right up close to the camera, it blurs out that whole background really nicely. That's really cool. Yeah, that's a

good hack. I've never thought about that. Yeah, it's great. And the last thing is a big tube lamp as well. So to light that dark background a bit more nicely with some purple light red. Well, actually you can control the color of this as well. Found a tube lamp on Amazon too. Just this vertical standing lamp, three segments and a spotlight on the top. And again, link in the description below to find that one. I'll link to it, but it's really nice because it lights up.

Gives this kind of lovely. I'm using it purple just now, but it gives us lovely gradient of purple across that dark background. And the spotlight you don't have to use. But actually it works quite nicely. Just pointing it across the background as well behind my head kind of highlights the head a little bit too. I am struggling to envision what you're talking about. So when you say a tube lamp, do you mean like a fluorescent lamp, like the old kind that you'd have on?

No, pretty much that shape. It's not one of those, but it's exactly that shape. Just a big long tube vertically standing this one in a stand and a spotlight. Perched on top. Yeah, perched on top. Oh, okay, cool. That seems quite versatile. Yeah. So that's working really nicely as well. Actually gives a good effect to the videos. And that was only 30 quid, I think. Not too much. Yeah. So does the job, but yeah,

that's my lighting setup just now and I'm liking it a lot, actually. It lets me move things around a bit more, gives a bit more depth to the backgrounds and also for the face lighting too. Works really nicely. Yeah, yeah. It sounds like you've got a lot of options as well. And not all of them super expensive things. You know, there's good ideas in there to do it on the cheap and give yourself a bit of room to try different corners or different lighting and. Yeah,

yeah, yeah. Those background effect ones, like the Philip Wiz one or whatever that's going in the background of the shot, I could buy. Yeah, if you had a budget of like $100, 200, you could buy, you know, half a dozen of them easy, place them around, give some really nice effects. Hi. So I'm happy with it. Okay. Right, let's go to a creator of the week. We haven't had a creator of the week for a while. I know you're watching just now. Yeah, I am.

Not a lot of new people is the thing. And I think I'm just being quite selective, really. There's just a feeling at the moment with the Internet, like there's all sorts of crap out there, all sorts of people saying all sorts of things. Yeah. But there's one person I've started watching really frequently, and his name is David Larby Larbi. And I found him on YouTube. I found him through shorts, actually.

And his shorts are little moments and little reflections on his day, but written as poetry and done in such a way that it feels like it was completely done on the spot. And it may very well have been, but probably not. And yeah, he just totally got me with that. So I went and had a look at his channel and it's very simple. He does a podcast, which he puts onto YouTube, and he just does it consistently and it's great. They're like 1215 minutes long.

But the thing I love about it is that every single word is considered and there's something about coming from finding them on YouTube shorts and the sort of like, I don't know, like reflective poetry, little vignettes and that just totally translated as a sort of feeling and a vibe into the podcast, despite the fact it wasn't actually poetry, but it just felt that considered. So it's called mindful moments and

it's like I say, 1215 minutes and it's just him. And it's kind of based on his own life, and he's taking things that he's working on or thinking about, or just taking inspiration from his own life to talk about things and kind of guide you through thinking about these things yourself. Probably nothing like. It's nothing revolutionary in terms of the idea of what he's doing, but I just think in the execution,

it just feels quite special. And he's not a big creator. He's got like 13,000 subs or something on YouTube, which is really good, but it's not. He's not. He's not huge. And yeah, there's just something about him. There's just some people that you come across sometimes and the work that they do, and it just. You just know there's something special about it. I'm fairly certain that, you know, he's on his way to breaking out and he's going to be. He's going to be a big creator at some point.

I put money on it. But yeah, the thing with the podcast and the YouTube is I think it's more normal. It's definitely more normal in YouTube to have like a head camera. We're going to talk about topic for 10, 12, 13 minutes, but there's something about a solo podcast that is much more difficult, I think, and I've not seen it done super

well in a lot of places. There's one other person that I can think of that does the same for me in terms of a solo podcast, and it's a creator called Blind Boy who's an irish gentleman who has a supermarket bag on his head. I've talked about him a little bit before, but he's a fantastic, fantastic creator. He's a writer, he's a musician. He obviously doesn't take himself too seriously, but he takes the world and life and philosophy very, very seriously and he's

very. Yeah, same. Same thing as David. Just great execution and fantastic to listen to. I think solo podcasts at their best are they feel intimate and they feel warm and they feel cozy and it feels, it's just pleasurable in a way that group things aren't, you know, it's just purely that person. And when someone's kind of got that special something about them, it's just. Yeah, it's great. So I highly recommend them. But it was, I think it was a great case study in like,

he's got a simple plan. You know, he does this, I think, once every week or once every few days or it's just quite consistent. It comes into my inbox and it's the same sort of thing every day, but it's the execution that really makes it really feel really, really special. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of, it's the epitome of that one to one connection, the personality, the intimacy that podcasting is really good at, isn't it, when it's just one person

speaking and if they do it well as well. There's the old

adage, when you're speaking on the radio, you're not speaking to a crowd of people, you're speaking to one person and always treat it as if you're speaking to one person. So never say, hey, listeners. You say, hey, listener. Thank you for, thank you for popping in and having listened to me. How are you doing today? And a solo podcast, I think, is so much better at that. Yeah. And one thing that he does, just to be a little bit more specific about it,

is right at the start of the episode, it's called mindful moments. So he actually does like a. Every episode it starts the same way. You know, start for a moment if you can, if you're able to close your eyes, take a deep breath in and a deep breath out, and he does it with you. And then the episode starts and it's just. It's fantastic, you know, because he's asking you quite directly, like, let's listen. Let's just do this podcast together. You know, it feels like.

It really does feel like that. Like you say, like it's to that one person. I think because you've taken action on, like, I don't know, you're not just listening to it. You're kind of part of the episode for the rest of the episode. It's brilliant. Yeah. Lovely. Gives you a nice feeling. It does, it does, yeah. He's got very, very nice voice as well, which helps. Always helps in a podcast. Yeah. All right, so that was David Lorby. Excellent. All right.

Okay, I've got one last one let's finish up with. And it kind of ties on with. Ties on to the video. Sorry. The video lighting side of things. It's the way I'm thinking about video. So I've been thinking about video a lot more in terms of almost a barbell approach. And this may even translate

to other content as well, I'm not sure. But certainly with video, I find the trouble with video, as everyone knows, as you know, Jacob, it's like so heavy in terms of production, editing, even recording, like setting up lights, all that kind of stuff. Like the fact that I've spent the last couple of years almost try to build this studio so that I can just hit record and go and I don't have to move anything around. And I'm almost undoing that a

little bit in a way, right now. But it's deliberately because the way I'm thinking about it is that the barbell approach being that on one end you've got really rough and ready, totally unedited, unproduced, quite just like raw video. And then you move up in terms of quality, production value, all that kind of stuff, to the very other end, which is you put a lot of time in, like really good lighting. You spend ages setting up the camera. There's loads of variety,

all that kind of stuff. And that's on the other end. And then you've got everything in between. And I think over the last couple of years, I've done quite a lot of that in between video. Right in the middle, where we put a bit of work in. I do a bit of planning, I set up the lights, but I don't do too much. We don't edit that much out. We do I just make a plan? I speak and I kind of get away with it because I've spoken on things

for years and therefore I can mostly ad lib reasonably well. But it's not great. It could definitely do with editing, or it could definitely do with seven more takes to make it better and better and better. But I don't do that because we're right in the middle here. We're spending time on it, but we

don't have enough time to go full hog. And I think that's the kind of thing that has just kind of fallen flat on a lot of our videos in the last little while because it takes ages to do, and therefore we only do it every few weeks or something like that. And it still doesn't have that massive effect that I want it to have because it's not that well curated. So, in the last few weeks, I've been doing a lot more thinking about

doing both ends. So instead, actually, a lot of the videos I've done in the last couple of months have been quite rough and ready. I've just grabbed a screen capture app and I've just demonstrated something on screen and taught something. And a lot of the best videos, or a lot of the best performing videos in our channel have been exactly this. They've just been me demonstrating how to use audacity to do this certain thing, or how to use a bit of software to

do this thing in podcasting. And those things actually do really well because they just answer a question and they get it done quick and there's little bits of polish you can do. So I found a couple of tools where you can make those screencasts look nicer. Put my face on it, all that kind of stuff. So that's fine. But they really don't take that much editing. So that's the rough and ready side of it.

And equally, I think this falls into that a little bit, too. Like, we're recording for an hour and then we're doing some production around this. We're chopping out the segments and just publishing that. But we're not doing very much editing on this either, are we, Jacob? So I think this falls into that end, too. But the other end. Yeah, sorry, go on. No, nothing. Nothing. Sorry. Continue. And on the other end, you've got the pillar

videos. So now what I'm thinking is, the only time when I'll actually do some production, actually put some thought into it, is when I'm doing some kind

of pillar video that really answers a big question for our audience. Something that's really asked for and it's worth putting the effort into. And then it's actually going to be a few hours for planning, thinking through some of those cutaways ahead of time, thinking like, what can make this a bit more engaging, a bit more entertaining? I'm talking about this. Can I do a wee demo and I'll record that over in that corner? Or can I just pretend I'm

somebody else and make it a bit funny over here or something? A little bit of that. Just make a video hit that next level and equally moving around. So doing some filming over in that corner, doing some filming here, doing some filming over there. Maybe going out and about and doing a bit of filming there where it's worth setting up the video, setting up the camera, the lighting, all that kind of stuff, just to make it that next level. But this is a video that we want to put a lot of work into

because it's going to stand the test of time. It's going to be around for a year, two years, and it's going to be that next level that really attracts people in. So that's the concept. Either rough and ready or go all the way and make it worth it. And I'm thinking try and avoid all costs. Those ones in the middle that really don't have that much impact, but we end up putting a few days worth of work into them anyway. So, yeah, I think that's

a really interesting way to look at it. And I think it sounds really good to me. I had never thought about that. Because we do. We do that bit in the middle where we try to do maybe a lot after the fact, but we always don't.

Always, but often starting from the same kind of source footage for the video, which is mostly just face to camera one place and then trying to make it feel a bit fancier after the fact that it sounds like what you're saying is for the videos that we want to put that extra bit of work into, it's really about the. It's really about taking it more as a creative piece of work and doing that creative reproduction and thinking about how we tell a story or how we solve a problem, not just the

education or the story. Do you know what I mean? It makes total sense on the other side of things. If we're going to do. If we're going to try and do quick videos that are just like, this is what we're doing and we're going to get it to you in a way that you can easily understand, like, yeah, make that as streamlined as possible, because those videos do well and they don't need anything else when they are just solving a problem. When you're, you know, trying to.

It means that we can. We can do keyword research on problems that people are actually searching for and quite quickly answer them and start ranking for those things, but for those. More. Yeah, yeah, I like this a lot, and I think it's a great way to be thinking about it. How much of this was kind of bouncing off someone else? How much of this did you start to piece together after talking to Barbara? I mean, I'd already been moving much more towards the rough and ready stuff over

the last few months, definitely, because I was just wanting to. I was just seeing the kinds of videos that work well for us, the kinds of stuff I wanted to record and the capacity that I had. So I'd already started cutting out just generally anything that needed a lot more production

through necessity. But then as soon as she came on board and started bouncing around some of those more creative ideas, the idea, and gave, again, that more capacity to actually put the motion graphics in there or cut away to certain elements or find good b roll, all that kind of stuff, suddenly we can think that way. So, yeah, it's definitely been powered a little bit by her that kind of going back up to much more higher production value just

because we can. Just because she's actually there to build to facilitate it. So, yeah, that's the idea. Yeah, I'm liking the idea, actually, of just treating this like we've already been cutting this show up and turning it into segments to go on video. So this segment could be a segment about how to do barbell content. And we do maybe four, five, six segments per episode. And then maybe we pick four or five of them. We just keep pretty rough and ready, and it's

a good bit of content for people. Five minutes on this, five minutes on that. But then one of them, we actually put a bit more work into, like the lighting one, for example. It was already going through my head as we were talking on that. That would be one that could be a really good 1015 minutes segment.

That's almost a studio tour. And actually, in that case, it's worth me taking some videos of that bar light that you couldn't understand what it looked like, or these soft boxes to demonstrate them, or the background with the Philips whiz light. And we edit them on. And actually, that's the one segment of that episode that we put some more work into and make it more highly produced. So even within episodes of this, the creator toolbox, we could apply

that to it, I think. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. So, yeah, we'll see where it goes. Well, it's a plan I'll try over the next few months and see where we go, see how many of these

pillar posts, pillar videos we create. I've already done one yesterday, so I recorded one yesterday, but I expect now to have to go back and record a few more clips for it because I want to go back and forth with Barbara and you for that matter, around any ideas and things we can add in here to make it more clear or little demos or little examples, whatever it might be. So then with that one, I'm happy to go back and actually add things to it and film over a few days with a bit of feedback in

between. So we'll see how that changes the quality. Yeah, sounds good. I mean, there's so many ways to break these things down. It's cool. Yeah, indeed. Cool. All right, you got anything else for this week?

A small thing. A small thing, yeah. I mean, we're always talked about productivity a lot on the, on the show, but there's just a. We experiment that I'm going to start now, and I think what I'll do is try it out and then I'll report back and I'll let people know how it went. Have you ever had, have you ever tried splitting your day, splitting your day into more than one part, your work day? I mean, I guess, yeah, I guess the way I think about it is I tend to split

my day in two halves. One is kind of creative deep work, and the other is more the admin and meetings and stuff like that. But that's probably about as far as I've gone with it. Is that what you mean? Well, actually, no. What I wanted, what I want to try and do is it's kind of based on something I was trying a little while ago. In terms of productivity. It started going usually about two

blocks a day in between big tasks. So it gives me space to kind of off ramp and then on ramp onto the next thing. And I found that it gave me, it gave me more mental energy and it gave me sort of more

longevity for the day. So I quite enjoyed that. That worked quite well. So what I'm thinking about trying is still trying to keep these sort of blocks of deep work, but doing three and a half hours and then 3 hours away and then three and a half hours back on the one thing where the one place I think this might fall down is I think it's a great dream to have two of these deep work blocks a day, but realistically there's going to be some smaller things and admin things

that are going to have to go in there. So the question is like, if I look at my calendar for the week and every morning it's like, got a deep block there and a deep block in the afternoon, can I concentrate all these small things into one block in a week? Probably not, because things just come up, but the logic is that it's just kind of upscaling the idea of that walk. If I'm getting good mental energy and good checkout from one thing and able to move on to the next without suffering

too much. That kind of context switching problem that we've talked about before. Yeah. My hope is that over the course of a week and over the course of multiple weeks, I'll be able to do more. Because one thing that I felt was happening was I was getting good sessions in every day of deep work that were maybe like six or 7 hours long, which out of an eight hour day is pretty good and

the rest of it would just be small little bits and bobs. But I was finding that as that kind of compounded over multiple weeks was actually starting to burn out a little bit because I think deep work is something that we all seek, but it's also by nature, I think it takes quite a lot of energy as well. It feels good as you're doing it and it feels sustainable and it is hard, but sustaining that over a long period is difficult and

what are the options after that? So you do a month straight of fantastic deep work every day, but then you're exhausted. So do you just choose not to do deep work, which is hard because it's like, this is often some of your best work, it's the most fun work. And yeah, so what I want to try and do is account for that, but over the course of that period and see if that works, two, three and a half hour blocks with a good break in the middle. Yeah,

yeah, I wonder. I wonder if within that, like three and a half hours of deep works actually like exhausting as well. Like, I wonder if even it will be something like if you're talking about trying to fit in the more small two, two and a half hours really kind of focused in flow and then surface for air and then you've got an hour to just catch up

on a few emails, messages, some admin tasks, that kind of thing. So you get, you still get like 5 hours of deep work a day, but then you're getting an hour at the end of each session to do the firefight and all that kind of stuff. Wonder if that would work. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's realistically it's going to be something like that. Because the other thing, the way that I was trying to do it before, I was trying to schedule in blocks of deep work in different places.

And it, like every week it was changing just depending on what I was working on. Like, I've got. I need to package up all these small things into one block and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know, I think it could just be that these, these bits and bobs in the firefighting, as you say, it can just be at the start or end of one of those blocks, and then the rest of that block can be just one big thing, you know? Yeah. Digging into one. Just one thing. Yeah.

So I don't know. I don't know how it's gonna work, but, yeah, that's why I'm doing it, to try and fight that longer term burnout. But, yeah. What do you do in those 3 hours between. Well, yeah, good question. I. The reason I think the walks are working is it would normally be like 2030 minutes. And I would listen to music, and I purposely, purposefully listen to music, not just stick on shuffle. I would pick an album and start listening to it, or I would pick a particular few

songs and cue them up or that kind of thing. Or I'd listen to a podcast, but not just a news podcast, because I normally listen to a news podcast in the morning and it's not getting my full attention. I would listen to something that I was going to really listen to, you know, and I just found it was enriching and it was giving me, if not more physical energy. I didn't really need it. I was just sitting doing work all day. It was giving me mental energy.

It was giving me something that I could use in that next piece of work. It was giving me input for creativity. So I think what I want to do with those 3 hours is something enriching for either for body, something physical, some exercise, or for the soul. And that might be. It might just be reading a book. Today, what I did was the first day that I've managed to do it because I'm

adjusting with weird time zones. But today I went a walk, got a little bit of lunch, tried some new food that I'd never tried before, which is always fun, but it's something new and it's something, you know, it's not just popping down to the baker and getting the same thing you get every day. It's like something new to me, something that does enrich and read a new book,

a great new book. And, like, that was simple, you know? But I came back feeling pumped, you know, I'd had a nice wee bit in the middle, but things like that. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, it's great. Yeah, totally. It does. It absolutely does. And it's. That's the. It's the trouble that things like this, things like that, activities like that feel like they're a waste of time when you're. When you're behind, you know, when there's things to do, whether that's personally,

like, you're. You get chores in the house or whether it's professionally, like, there's things you're really wanting to achieve with your work. Just the idea of sitting down and reading a book for an hour in the middle of the day or in the morning even, it's like, it feels like such a luxury that it's just impossible. But the days I had to re experiment myself a little while ago, where I got up a bit earlier, I tried to become

a morning person for a while, and I'm really useless at it. I just don't like it, to be honest. So I gave up on it. But the one part that I took from it that I really liked was that one part of it was, I can't get up and exercise because I can't. I can't force myself to go to bed at 06:00 a.m. to do something that's really difficult. It just makes it twice as difficult

to get out of bed. But I found, actually, for a little while, I could go to bed if I knew I was just going to roll out of bed, I was going to turn on the kettle, and then I was going to read a book for an hour. And it would generally be something that was kind

of vaguely productive, as in, it was. Whether it was historical or whether it was something related to work or something related to personal development or something like that, it wasn't fiction, so it still felt like I was achieving even a little bit of something. But just the idea of sitting and reading like that for a while was just luxurious. And it just set me up with such a sense of positivity and achievement for the day. So it was. It was really cool.

So nowadays, I'm trying to build that into a bit later in the day. Like, even just take 20 minutes to just go and sit and read or something. But yeah, I think, yeah, sounds really cool. What? Is there anything you think might go wrong with it? Yeah. The thing that I'm. The thing that I'm actually mostly concerned about is having it work with my sleeping schedule. I've tried the morning thing too, and I loved it, but it wasn't sustainable because I'm just naturally not

an early morning person. As much as I really appreciate it, enjoyed it at the time, it always tends to drift towards me being up later and getting up a bit later. Not like late in the day, but like not 06:00 a.m. either, you know, 05:00 a.m. that kind of thing. I was. I was actually 05:00 a.m. for the first couple of weeks of that and I was like, wow, this is really cool and I can do it. I didn't think I could do this, but I just slowly started drifting away and I think I could go back to it,

but it's not natural to me. That doesn't mean I shouldn't try, but yeah, I'm just, I'm concerned about

my making my sleeping schedule work with it because to make this work in the way I want it to, I do have to be up probably earlier than I would naturally, which is fine, but it's like just getting the balance, that's probably. Yeah, that's the thing that I'm worried about. And also the 3 hours in between, I'm not totally certain on that being the right amount of time. It might be too much, it might be too

little. My logic is that if I want to go somewhere and do something, if I want you to go on a long walk, that's plenty of time. If I wanted to go on a short hike, that's also probably enough time to get there and get back. And it means I can get from a to b to. To do pretty much anything in that time. Not anything, but like quite a lot of enriching and interesting things. You know, I can get to the other side of town and visit a place I want

to visit and all these things. I'm just not. Yeah, not certain, but it'll take a. Bit of playing around, but with the schedule. But I mean, yeah, I could imagine even starting work at, you know, half nine to half twelve or something like that, taking 3 hours off, you're back at three something, and then even the after another 3 hours from there only takes you to six or seven. So you're still. Yeah, not even finishing too late. I'm not sure. No. And then if that feels

good on paper, like, half fines are very reasonable. Start sorting times knowing I normally start, but, like, I also feel like in the evening time, I'm gonna want that. A little bit of extra time to unwind and, like, yeah, I just need to be. I think I need to be strict in the evening. I think that's what I need to watch. I need to be strict about the time that I'm cutting myself off in terms of personal time and just make sure I'm in bed. No devices,

you know, I've wound down. And that's it. I think that's it. I think that's the. Probably the main threats to the plan. Great. Well, look forward to hearing how it goes. Yeah. It's funny how we all feel so tied to our, you know, the nine to five. Like, whatever it was. I can't remember the story. Is it, like, ford or something like that? Set it up just to manage their factory workers back in the 19 oat cake,

and. And they're basically just stuck since then, even though it doesn't really suit the current economy whatsoever. There's, like, all these routines that basically were set up for all sorts of reasons that just don't. Don't exist anymore. So, yeah, find your own. All right, great. Thank you for another good episode, Jacob. That was good fun. Thank you. Lots of hope out there. Yeah, I hope you out there listening. Got something from this.

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